The Indian and the Pennsylvania Dutch

The New World as a Metaphor of the Kingdom of God

Draw if you will, unless you think Herriot already did in Virginia, the poet John Donne trying to get to Jamestown who declares, "but who ere saw, though nature can work so, /That pearl, or gold, or corn in man did grow. / We have added to the world Virginia." The newest creature of that world whose virtue likened it to the golden age was a metaphorical Virginian, a voyager under the protection of the Virgin settling the ground of Christ (136).What benign interactions between foreign peoples these lines might suggest is far different from the real politik extermination of native cultures. But, big surprise! The Indian in our analogy is not from America. He is from India!

Real politik in the treatment of occupied peoples is the most common new world act. Nowhere is the velvet glove more off the fist than in England's occupation of India. This treatment also compares with the Pennsylvania Dutch, but American Indian, Welsh and Irish also have tales. Majority history myths are romances of the popular mind to take social control. The Pennsylvania Dutch got along well enough with the Originals without calling them child of the devil as the English Puritans did, which seems visionary in those Utopian states of golden ages, harmony with nature, gentle breezes, three harvests.

No good deed is unpunished. English occupation of colonies is more brutal the further it strays from European ethnicity. British education in Ireland was not as much charged with the root of racism as it was in India. In India the English cultural machine was in full view, even if Swift's fictional/realistic Irish peasants model his yahoos. It is everywhere commonplace that English/ British oppression occurred in greatest force in India, not that a like cultural war did not also occur in the homeland of the Welsh, and Irish as among the Bengali. English Cultural wars are still going on against the Hispanic.

Colonial rule in India demanded that "Britain needed a class of intellectuals meek and docile in their attitude towards the British, but full of hatred towards their fellow citizens. It was thus important to emphasize the negative aspects of the Indian tradition, and obliterate or obscure the positive." These were standard procedures. The Pennsylvania German was called such names as stubborn and thickheaded so much they even so called themselves. "Indians were to be taught that they were a deeply conservative and fatalist people - genetically predisposed to irrational superstitions and mystic belief systems." The educated native remnant was to think and speak like the conqueror and reinterpret itself as English. These quisling substitutes did the teaching.

The particulars of German speech and habits cited by Weygandt in Red Hills (1929) match the Dutch equivalent of these "intellectuals meek and docile." They were people "doing what they did in the days before the Mexican War, interpreted without sympathy it means that the 'Dumb Dutch' do not know that the world moves":

It is a worn witticism in Pennsylvania that we still vote for Andrew Jackson in Berks. This saying, interpreted with sympathy for us, means that things change so slowly in the heart of the Red Hills that people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War. Interpreted without sympathy for us it means that the "Dumb Dutch" do not know that the world moves. A libel, some of us declare the last interpretation, a half libel others. There are those among us who will admit it has in it a modicum of truth, if it be taken, of course, figuratively. In any event it serves to point out that we Pennsylvania Dutch are the most conservative people in America. We still approve strongly of all Andrew Jacksons, of their works and of their ways (5).

Take the Dutch hex signs for irrational superstition and their sectarian pietism for mystic belief systems and you can see the analogy between India and Pennsylvania, although the argumentative will want to say that these occurred at different times, hence must not be true, and anyway the Germans were the colonists not the English. False rhetoric continues until the lights go out.

British rhetoric said that India "had no concept of nation, national feelings or a history," which argument applied also to the division of the Dutch between Church and Sect, as if, to reduce it to most common denominator, hex signs and plain dress were their markers of culture, as Yoder says ( ). Such rhetoric declared that "if they had any culture, it had been brought to them by invaders - that they themselves lacked the creative energy to achieve anything by themselves." This writes large the trivialization and peasantization of Dutch culture that centuries of folklore societies and universities foster.

"The British, on the other hand epitomized modernity - they were the harbingers of all that was rational and scientific in the world:" escape from this mental prison of ethnicity for the young was the same for the Navajo and Pennsylvania German as it was for the Indian, identify with the British and repeat the idea of their superiority verbatim in the minds of young who receive instruction. The British in India created a class of quislings, as Macaulay (1835, cited in this source), 'to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.'" [see British Education in India]

These native English-Indians were the vanguard of cultural domination. Their role in India resembled the church groups in Pennsylvania, Lutheran and Reformed, who much to the disagreement of their own historians that this happened, sold themselves for social acceptance to the English. The quisling Pennsylvania German class, speaking for the colonial powers, characterized the native German in burlesque, a caricature, of itself. Yoder says that as Dutch plain folk got plainer and legislated their plain dress to further their Dutch identity, church folk painted hex signs on their barns to preserve their compromised ethnicity.

English rule was always to insinuate shame where their language wasn’t spoken, like the dual street signs in Wales with the Cymraeg crossed out. English fear of German dominance in PA was a chief motive behind English Only, if that phrase sounds familiar, but English domination could not have occurred without the deconstruction of Pennsylvania German culture and language. This deconstruction took many forms. Peasantry, including folk art, was denigrated as ignorance. You can take political and social prisoners if you denature ethnicity and language, for instance, put all the Navajo children in "Indian schools," where they are forced to speak English. You say the Americans did that, not the English, but that is the point. The English transferred all their social control systems to the Americas. There the majority leaders were English and quisling English. These mind games occurred between the English and every ethnic and racial group in America, the Indian the first, the German the second, the Hispanic the latest.

Turning self-denial into an inferiority complex, English parody of the German began with the so-called dark faces and incomprehensible tongues that antagonized Ben Franklin. These were made to symbolize the mind. Franklin’s prejudice gets barely a footnote in his illustrious life, as though his prejudice were merely a stigma against farmers. This prejudice existed before 1730, when Pennsylvania had passed two acts to regulate immigration, requiring an oath of allegiance to George I, the taking of names, occupations and points of origin of immigrants in the famous ship lists. How many immigrants there were was exaggerated, but even the exaggerations were doubled to make Franklin’s point. His cronies insisted around 1750 that Pennsylvania was being overrun. Various Presbyterian and Anglican clergy influenced by Franklin hatched a scheme called the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge and the English Language among the German Emigrants in Pennsylvania (1753). Its purpose was to domesticate the either 60 or 100 thousand “foreigners,” and “strangers,” for “speaking a different language from the English colony’ (S. Chandler, quoted 309).

It was always the view of the formal churches, Lutheran and Reformed, that true wisdom came from hierarchy and authority, not from people. Church formalists reasoned that the populace was “utterly ignorant” and “in danger of sinking deeper and deeper every day into these deplorable circumstances, as being almost entirely destitute of instructors, and unacquainted with our language” (Smith, 309). This talk masked deeper political and social motives, especially that the Germans “shall turn our trade out of its proper channel by their connections, and perhaps at last give some of our Colonies laws and language” (Smith, 310). Such rhetoric stemmed from Franklin’s ideas and politics. Franklin’s more plain view was that the “Palatine Boors” should “swarm into our Settlements” (Letter 1751) “of the most ignorant Stupid Sort (Franklin, [1753] (1961: IV, 483–484). Their ignorance and stupidity were reason for thinking they would subject themselves to “Credulity” and “Knavery,” meaning influence by the French. That Pennsylvania would become a “colony of aliens” provoked fear that they “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion" (IV, 24.[confirm page #] Franklin's wit betrays the racism of his understanding. (The letter of May 9, 1753 to Peter Collinson.)

So Franklin made alliance with “Lutheran, some Reformed, and the rest Englishmen” who were offended by the many undisciplined populist sects of Mennonites and Dunkers because they opposed their views on infant baptism, war and serving in the militia, let alone paying the war tax. The ill-fated Michael Schlatter was appointed Supervisor of these “schools” of correction in the German settlements, but was mightily opposed by the Germantown printer Christopher Saur. Schlatter funded a rival press supporting his views against Saur. Since the school plan was merely to anglicize Germans and maybe to get German votes to fund military salaries for preachers and schoolmasters, Saur supposed that they “had the least regard for the uninformed Germans of Pennsylvania, to actually convert them; or whether the establishing of the Free-schools, is not rather to serve as a foundation upon which to establish the thralldom of the Germans” (319). In addition to language, religion and war were vehicles of English prejudice as Franklin mocked the German mind, habit and skin color. If the goal was to make them “good protestants, join the militia, speak English,” the means was backward. In the end the free school movement lasted but ten years. Schlatter resigned and joined the British Army as a chaplain!

Saur said that turning everyday people to English speech had as its motive a social overturning of German society, like Mennonite arguments against contact with outsiders, for “German children learn to speak English according to English fashions; and parents have a great deal of trouble to get such foolish whims out of they heads” (320). The English attempt to steal ethnicity with language was not a religious or altruist but “a political affair” (321), as Muhlenberg, who initially supported the plan, later said. Franklin's fear that too many Germans would destabilize the colony show the fears of a xenophobe, but with inevitably greater fallout than that. Yoder says (280)

the disappearance of the parochial school and the shift to the English language especially caused the loss of “the mystical and theosophical symbolism of Rose and Tulip and Lilly of Jacob Boehme and his medieval sources” (280). This impacted every folk form from fraktur to design, “the entire nineteenth century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans” (280).

However you define it, it is not easy to make the invisible visible. To view nature as uncontaminated, whether without or within, contradicts puritan thought, Calvinist and American fundamentalism. It contradicts materialism and is most contrary to what is taught in the schools about these Pennsylvania people, who if they did view nature as uncontaminated were among the first environmentalists. Though the flowering heart was gone by the Civil War, with remnants lasting a half century, it is still easy to love their flower torn as a product of their cultural endgame, indoctrinated with English poetry, puritanism and dominion politics so that every prejudice the Pennsylvanians internalized might be taken as fact, which tells in fact that it is not.

English culture invented a theology to include the destruction of the natural with the cultural; both were allied against the Germans not only for control, but because it as also a habit. The English did it without thinking, the natural expression of a will to empire. This value system of domination was transferred from its specific English origin to more general "white" politics with scarcely a murmur from the English authorities, and their thinkers. To claim cultural dominion as their own would be to expose themselves as its authors, so dominion was cast as a wider cultural custom belonging to all white new world settler groups, but it was all along only English politics and theology transferred entire to the now dominant, American culture, an English Only beyond language. Take heart you ethnic white people, you are not all inherent racists.

The English invented American racism. Boehme and the PA Dutch were a different cup of tea from the reigning English philosophy of Puritan and erudite Jefferson who sounds like Franklin on the imperfections of the Germans when he worries about Jews' so called inferior moral philosophy. Jefferson had razored out the words of Jesus, “cutting verse by verse out of the printed book” and made his own gospel of 46 pages (The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 384). Expunging the so-called Platonized corruptions from the text did not however result in his own perfection; attention to the details of the Law would have remedied his own failure of the “minute enumeration of duties” (383) he blames the Jews for keeping. Neither did the English understand the natural goodness the Germans posited. If you boil it down to a sound bite, what you get from the Pennsylvania Dutch is more acceptance than rejection, for rejection had already been theirs in Holland and Germany.

The argument that the demise of German acculturations was a function of social controls foisted on them by the English, with subtle and not so subtle social mechanisms, is not favored by writers such as Don Yoder, the best contemporary. His epilogue of German Broadsides takes its assumption that such losses are to be expected and are good and desirable in order to make American homogene, the Americanization of sorting out the idiosyncrasy of subgroups so they can be homogeneous interchangeable parts of American citizens held together by a general glue such as economy, human rights, commercialism and language.

This is the implicit destiny of all migrant groups then and seen as a good by homogenators now. But do not forget that once the sub culture is denatured, subverted from its peculiarity, identity shorn, it is more apt to social control. What is done to the immigrant group to make it general and American is now to be done to the American to make it global. That this argument is somehow progress not loss is an issue. That this occurs concomitantly with the standard of diversity, that many are one, only shows that the opposite of things is the case. The more diverse we get the more the same we get. Blacks, Germans, Hispanics, Indians, once they lose they languages and folkways will be the same interchangeable widget the English first desired to control.

This phenomenon where the cure becomes the disease is common enough in psychology where the patient is named for the disease and the side effects of medications given for the cure become the new symptoms and cause. The phrase that we are our own worst enemies in the environment or the economy where, if we do stop spending for consumer goods, the greater economy will go into depression, but it we spend we individually all go broke, pretends that acclimation to gas prices if done in an unpatterned way prevents pain. But this fails to realize that a sudden shock would have changed behavior and caused true change. Applied to culture and subcultures this makes for denaturing, denuding, destroying the uniqueness of whatever is addressed, wilderness, humanity, botany, wildlife.

Not that the Germans did not reject themselves. The seeds of division were the stuff of social control, although the more formal churches were quicker to identify with the colonial English powers, witness the tortured Schlatter. Folklorist Don Yoder sees division as a function of religion, not of politics, that the "sectarians withdrew from worldly matters; in fact the word "worldly" among them had a negative connotation" (The Pennsylvania German Broadside, 170), he says with amazing naivete, as though worldliness were not a huge Biblical problem. That Lutheran and Reformed groups should be "both church members and citizens" was the point of tension for the whole he says, so

"because of this radical division, this cultural gulf between the plain sectarians and their more worldly neighbors in the Lutheran and Reformed churches, the Pennsylvania Dutch population has never been able to unite on any major political or cultural question" (171).

But we want look at it differently as though there were a war of attrition and survival being waged and like any war of this kind quisling substitutes infiltrate the native, naive body politic to disestablish it. All kinds of pretty humanistic labels put on this change it not. We're doing it for your own good, making you learn, dragging you kicking and screaming into the 20th century, or to the texting world of the 21st. The tactics are the same. Liberation and emancipation mask darker motives. These motives are not likely to be confessed, instead their uncovering will be resisted. Do you want to perpetuate cultural ignorance, the Dutch seemed to ask themselves?

But their insecurity was forced from the outside.Yoder laments the failure of Zinzendorf's attempt in 1742 to join all the churches under his headship. He calls an "ecumenical project" what was a naked power grab clothed in religious images and words (175). The sectarians were as suspicious of him as Sauer was of Franklin's effort to establish English schools for the Germans.

Yoder allows the loss of German individuality just about the time of everyone else: "in the twentieth century Pennsylvania Dutch religion changed radically. The churches themselves became group oriented. Following the American penchant for joinerism...(175), but at least he allows that "all of these institutions came in from the English world of Anglo-American denominationalism" (175). Revivalism, Boy Scouts, Christian Endeavor and like species, with premillenialism were introduced from without. With this came demythology of the Dutch status. Yoder allows (210) came efforts of scholars to show how the former beliefs, whatever they were, were superstition, "a common conceit of scholarship at the time" (1908), in this case referring to the Himmelsbrief, or so called Heaven-letter, a species of pow-wow that is the neverending delight of Dutch synchopants, like today's equivelent of the chain letter, a deranged take on sympathetic magic derived from Boehme and his theory of Correspondance that began late (1820), but is an example of a much wider practice of disestablishing all the Dutch beliefs and ways with a few, so that, throughly anglicized, their culture was discredited and abandoned.

Sect or Insect

Right away the designation of 10 % or 25% of the Dutch population as sect does not endear them to any sensibility. The connotations are difficult. Those who control history are in charge, the majority Dutch, as Yoder finally calls them (Broadsides, 87) deny prejudice, say that this was the designation from the beginning.

There is a shadow of prejudice of the Church groups against the plain sects. To be fair there is a rejection of the Churched as doctrinally weak and worldly, substituting world wisdom for biblical. But majority prejudice rules, so that of the Church groups went against anyone who opposed the standard historical line they offered. The Churched after all did not suffer in the old world as the plain sects did and their claim that they came, like the sects, to gain freedom to worship in America comes with the old assumptions of power from the state to enforce their way, how else explain the short shrift their best historians Henke and Harbaugh give for the founding of the first Reformed church in PA, in Skippack, c 1727? This we continue to research here.

This animus does not seem to be returned from the plain sects against the churched, just a rejection of what they consider false doctrine, viz. infant baptism, worldliness. Yoder revisits this again and again when he cites "this radical division, this cultural gulf" Broadsides, 171), even attributing to plain sects part cause in "the demise of the hex sign..when they purchase a farm with hex signs, the signs are one of the first things to disappear...part of their aesthetic of plainess" (Hex, 39). This troubles him because he attributes the images on barns as a last vestige of the culture, but the plain people would surely retort that the images are within their minds.

This Shaker-like aesthetic of austerity does not quite claim "that their furniture was originally designed in heaven, and that the patterns have been transmitted to them by angels," as cited by Thomas Merton. But Merton, already a monastic, sees what he himself has a capacity to know and likens the Shakers to Blake's interiors, invoking "Edenic innocence" (79), that "work was to be perfect, and a certain relative perfection was by all means within reach: the thing made had to be precisely what it was supposed to be. It had, so to speak, to fulfill its own vocation." (78-9). To further the point, "the American was a new being who had nothing to do with the world of European complexity and iniquity" (84).

Yoder says "Pennsylvania Dutch culture is still evolving, and the modern hex signs can be seen as new outgrowths of the older folk art trends that were brought from Europe and transplanted.... (Hex Signs, vii). That culture is more co-opted. Yoder says "this colonial ethnic group evolved into one of the most colorful and most original cultures on the East Coast." When you are all done put on the lights and put a sign on the container, Einstein's brain, which, except in science fiction, is not evolving. Latin is called a dead language with little embarrassment to Rome.

There are remnants of course of colonialism in the 60% unemployment rate on the Navajo reservation or the Pennsylvania suburbs made from farms. Yoder speaks for the point of view that all is well that they "formed one people with a culture united except for religion" (Hex, 2). United in what? Subjugated cultures continue to exist, but not in the same state; they are artificially controlled. He says sociologists divided them into church and plain but he knows that was done from the very beginning before 1730 by Boehm and all the churched and furthered by Mittelberger, et al. Church and Plain means worldly and austerely and could well suit the opposition of mass manufacture vs. hand. Mass culture dictates that it will absorb you. The Church faction was absorbed and assimilated and as a reward got the tourist trade. The Plain groups, Plain and Plainer in dress, speech, life got islanded and compromised by the pressure of the great malleable whole.

The assumptions that justify this whole process of assimilation are today brought into question, not only from the the loss of identity through the creation of a group mind in the media, but from those same pressures toward globalization that promise to do to the American what was done to the Dutch. We do not need to pose an even further erosion of identity that would occur from contact with alien civilizations beyond earth's, but that analogy makes plain what happened to the Dutch and every other colonial or conquered people.

Majority scholars and quislings will want to posit exceptions to this general rule, but it stands in the same relation to the present as those Indians taken back to Elizabeth's court to be displayed, trophies of capture, followed by slavery at Jamestown. That is, the majority always takes captive one way or another, subverts native identity, appoints from among the natives governors, just as the Romans did, while it swallows them. This is not pretty put this way, for at all costs the majority view is to make things seem a lot better than they are. As Sartre might have said, resistance is existence in the will to know.

Assimilation was never a good idea, no matter what the propagandists say, especially if it was forced in subtle and unsubtle ways. It was never anything but the theft of a heritage, but its seamy underbelly has the prime minister of Australia apologizing for it even as Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Canada's native peoples for "forcing their children to attend state-funded schools aimed at assimilating them" (Bob Gillies, AP, June 12, 2008). Surely an apology is due the Hopi and Navajo children sent to "Indian schools" in Phoenix, where even roads are so named. These travesties seem easier to see than the very same things wreaked upon the Pennsylvania Dutch in the nineteenth century. Take their language, assimilate them into the body politic, but even then the "dark faces" Ben Franklin feared among the Dutch will succor racism. It is an English invention.

So far there has never been an attempt to view the Dutch as an oppressed or co-opted people subject to great pressures to surrender their ethnic identity as is commonly observed of the peoples of India in relation to the British. The difference is only a matter of degree.
David Weaver-Zercher gives a good summery of the cultural war between the English and the Dutch (The Amish in the American Imagination, 2001). It was entirely rhetorical, but understood against the history of English colonies in subverting the identity of sub groups, the Germans were pretty defensive, conceding the doltish nature they were charged with. "It was not that Pennsylvania Germans but were brutish by nature," the Pennsylvania German Society said, but "they were too busy conquering the elements to support higher education, fine arts and other cultural endeavors" (Weaver-Zercher, 28). This was exactly the line taken by thinking Dutch years after and I even heard it myself from older family.

The discussion of Stoudt in his preface concerning the demise of the Dutch cites many of the causes, but at the root is the whole belief that to fit in is good, to belong, to homogenize is necessary or desirable. The apology for speaking Dutch is that "it in no way distorts their Americanism" (xvi), not the other way round that speaking English does distort their Dutch. Colonial powers have usually found benign rule to be in their interest to encourage commercial exploitation.

Loss of identity is the damage done by the British/American propaganda machine to all subgroups. Call it "slow disintegration" or "slow absorption" "slow strangulation"(Stoudt xvii) the key is that "the Pennsylvania German soon began to view his own culture as outworn and outmoded" (xvii). It was the loss of the language and the culture, which was composed of practices, beliefs and doctrines different from the English. Many writers cite the loss of German devotional ways "as English hymns and devotional literature supplanted the traditional literature, as spiritual vitality degenerated into camp-meeting hallelujahs" (xviii), plus of course the grand Industrial revolution. In all this however Stoudt makes an assumption or a judgment that the ones who really defined the Dutch were the sects and not the Churched who assimilated more easily. This has probably caused him to be given short shrift in the 75% majority Dutch church culture. When he says "most of the German settlers...were religious refugees" (xvi) that is inaccurate, only the sects were. He takes the part for the whole, attributes most of the peculiarities to sects, "left-wing, radical Protestant groups," (xvi) and it is these whose vitality was dimmed by the camp-meeting hallelujas, it was these whose "apocalyptic ideas dimmed when the 'lily age' seemed further and further away" (xviii).

But the slow strangulation was also a function of the propaganda machine. Prejudice is learned not observed, says Gordon Allport, and all the more easily taught, especially when the people teaching it are one of the group. Yoder in Broadsides chooses his examples strangely, perpetuating the stereotype, that "European travelers, especially those of German background and education, who visited the Dutch Country in the nineteenth century, often sneered at what they considered the 'ignorance' and limited viewpoint of the Pennsylvania Dutch" (15). What is his point anyway? Travelers is plural but he gives only one example, "the most pointed" that proves the negative which he himself calls "damaging and very biased." But he quotes at length about the books on "dreaming and witchcraft" (17), the "corrupt dialect." His second example, not a traveler, but a scholar, damns with the faint praise that "they were not as ignorant as has sometimes been stated...granting that the aims of many of them, especially in the rural districts, were very narrow, nevertheless" (17). The weigh of this stereotype, repeated ad infinitum over centuries continues in the present. Its justification, for it will be justified, is that they are just repeating what was said. Ben Franklin lives.

There is something noxious in the immersion of every member of a class into an ethnic/language identity. That is the way sociologists work. Not troubling the exception, everything is the rule as if all of "them" were homogeneous. This mindlessness curses for instance David L. Valuska and Christian B. Keller's Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (2004) who cite Steven M Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land for the same repetitions. Only after reading these again and again does an underlying point of view, an ax that grinds come clear, a combination of defensiveness that hides behind scholarly fact/myths, as if apologizing for its subject, dumb, damn, Dutch, explicitly repeating 18th and 19the century prejudices and a repugnance it seems for the subject at all. This negative point of view is supported by the various societies and publishers who foster it, who must think it attracts the market they target, as though none of them survived Ben Franklin's worst day.

Pennsylvania Myth

Self-loathing is a deep contradiction, but it goes along with the Pennsylvania mythology of the simple, dumb German peasant. Apparently this is a saleable item for being so widely repeated on every front. Pennsylvania Dutch Stuff by Earl F. Robacker (1944) is as good as the current folklore in this even if so old. He says "the Pennsylvania Dutch of yesterday were a simple folk and came of peasant ancestry long ago" (1) which could no doubt be said of anyone.

If a twelfth of Americans were Dutch in 1775 that is roughly the same percent as Hispanics today. The problem doesn't go away. Proof comes from the mouth of travelers north of Bisbee. Spokesmen for minorities find alliances among liberal activists of human rights, or so it seems. The crux is always that they are "colonists of non-British extraction" (Stoudt, xv). Chauvinism is strong on both sides, but the stakes are greatest for the loser.

Works Cited

Thomas Merton. Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003.

John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. 1966.

Frederick S. Weiser in The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest by Monroe H. Fabian. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.

Cornelius Weygandt. The Red Hills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1929

Don Yoder & Thomas E. Graves. Hex Signs. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000

Don Yoder. The Pennsylvania German Broadside. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.